


The girl who kept running

by Lilliburlero



Category: The Marlows - Antonia Forest
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon, Stealth Crossover, Theatre
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-04
Updated: 2016-07-04
Packaged: 2018-07-21 13:44:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7389307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lawrie, aged sixteen and slightly cannier, is confronted with another part she's not quite sure how to play.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The girl who kept running

**Author's Note:**

  * For [antisoppist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/antisoppist/gifts).



‘Lawrie! _Law_ -rie! Come on, come on, you’re not going to believe it!’ Duncan Hart beckoned from the noticeboard where the cast-lists were pinned, then, losing patience, pushed his way through the thinning remains of the crowd and grabbed Lawrie’s hand, pulling her along in his gangling wake. ‘You’re one cool wee customer, you know that? Everyone else was here ten minutes ago, hopping from one foot to the other like they were dying for a pish.’

Lawrie was almost too gut-wrenchingly nervous to appreciate the tribute. The summer course at Brimpton Abbey was her chance to be the suave, careless person she knew she truly was: not baby Lal, weepily trailing seven siblings who all, in their different ways, made a perfect fetish of self-control, not _that awful ass Lawrie Marlow showing off again_ , but someone debonair, quirky and unpredictable. The name Sophia had lost some of its glamour since that spring half-term over two years ago, but the ideal remained one to live up to, and through the initial fortnight of workshops and auditions, Lawrie had somehow managed to pull it off. Duncan, admittedly, was unusually guileless—she could see now that not quite _everyone_ had been there when Rollo had come down to pin up the lists; one or two others—Katie with the discontented bee-stung lips and Nick with the unpronounceable Greek surname—had tried the same studiedly casual ruse as she, and were just now frowningly trying to locate themselves on the lists. 

Just before they reached reading distance of the board, Duncan clapped his huge, rawboned hand over her eyes. ‘You’re going to be thrilled—it’s brilliant, _we’re_ brilliant!’ 

He pushed her forward. Lawrie’s churning stomach seemed to bound into her throat. It couldn’t—it couldn’t possibly be—but it must. What else could Duncan be so excited about on her behalf? She had done her best to suppress her impulse to wager with _Them_ , but the trouble with that was it simply became another bargain, like a mirror reflecting itself: _if_ she didn’t try to trade off her silence concerning her wildest ambitions and dreams for them coming true, then they _would_ — She had learned, though, that keeping mum had its advantages: if she was to be disappointed, then at least no-one would know. She supposed that was why Nicola always did it. But she wouldn’t _be_ disappointed: she’d cantered through the audition, fleet of foot and silver of tongue, and at the end Rollo had detached his gaze from the ceiling and inscribed a single word with sufficient force to snap the lead in his pencil. 

‘Ta-da—!’ Duncan whipped his hand away, a relief, for it was clammy and redolent with his perpetual licorice-paper rollies. Lawrie squeezed her eyes shut before opening them onto a page blotted with black and purple floaters. _D—sin—net—LIV—Sus—by...Bas—FE—an B—ASTIAN...N—io—n w AGUE—Hart—Company:—_ As she ran her eye upwards again, they cleared, and she read: 

> VIOLA … June Hunter-Glynn

Lawrie swallowed and took a deep breath. There was no way that uncompromising J and H could be reshaped into L and M. It was wretchedly unjust, but all too probable: June’s height, bronze curls and square jaw were a better match for whoever was playing Sebastian—yes, it was Neil Jarman—than Lawrie’s five-foot-one-and-nearly-three-quarters and heart-shaped face under a blonde mop, whatever epicene swagger she put on. And June was a four-year Brimpton Youth Theatre trouper, lazy but with a certain strength of personality, recently engaged to her something-in-the-City boyfriend, destined to spend the next thirty-five years frustratedly outclassing one Surrey am. dram. society after another. Lawrie felt sorry for her, really: it was quite obviously a pity casting—Rollo, typically balancing pragmatism and kind-heartedness, had chosen to give her a last hurrah without jeopardising the success of the production—oh, dammit, it was no good, no good at all. It just wasn’t _fair_. She _understood_ Viola. If asked, she might, just for an easy life, have said it was twinnishness, but it wasn’t that at all: it was playing someone pretending to be what they really were. And as for Duncan, how could he be could be so _mean_? 

Burning, shameful salt threatened the corners of Lawrie’s eyes. Attempting to speak, she produced a choked, mewing noise. Her second attempt was better, though shrill and wobbly. ‘You utter beast, Dunc. Teasing me like that.’ She thought she might be able to make it, with a toss of the head and a coquettish stalk somewhere he couldn’t follow—the Ladies’—no, maybe not the Ladies’, the girls’ dorm, then. 

‘I’m no _teasing_ —look, you daft bampot.’ 

Duncan leaned down over her shoulder, jabbing the list. She flinched from his smell of saddle-soaped leather, Brut 33 and souring sweat, from his warm breath on her cheek. ‘We’re the only ones in our class—’ 

> MARIA … Lawrence Marlow  
>  SIR ANDREW AGUECHEEK … Duncan Hart

‘—to have real parts. The rest are all just Company, see.’ 

It was true. She sensed the tide of tears begin to withdraw. Feeling almost cheated, she had an absurd and self-defeating urge to fake it. But Katie, Nick and the two other slow-coaches made a very poor audience, even if she could concoct a suitably exotic, yet believable explanation for a display of sensitivity. 

' _And_ we’ll get to work with Toller more than anyone else, practically,’ Duncan added. 

Brimpton Abbey hired a guest star each summer: this year the role of Malvolio would be taken by Reginald Toller, long celebrated as a stage comedian, but in the last year elevated to a household name by the success of _Dry Rot_ , a sitcom in which he played a cantankerous, lecherous boarding-house proprietor. Off-stage, he was a _notorious character_ , which, Lawrie suspected (accurately) was a synonym for _notorious arsehole_. Still, Duncan had a point. 

Her eyes reliably dry, she twisted around, conveniently escaping Duncan’s disagreeably masculine ambience. He peered down at her through his grown-out, puddle-brown Beatle fringe. 

‘Goodness,’ she said, being Mrs Bertie’s crony, the one who relished funerals, ‘I think I’m in shock.’ She leaned against the wall by the noticeboard and, rather than sink down, starlet-fashion, stood square and feinted impotently at some invisible object just to her right. She had, half-consciously, spoken loudly enough to attract the attention of the departing stragglers. She met Katie’s eyes, grey sea glass, with long black lashes. Lawrie smiled, charming and modest, with gratifying result. Katie quickly looked away. ‘I’m not sure—’ Lawrie looked into Duncan’s fringe again, ‘I’m up to it.’ 

‘Balls. Of course you are. You’ll be—hilarious.’ He looked around, conspicuously conspiratorial. ‘I’m so glad Elaine didn’t get it. She’s more the physical type, of course, but your timing’s heaps better. And we can pad you out.’ His hand hovered somewhere in the vicinity of her ribcage, but seemed to possess better judgement than the man to whom it was attached. 

Crikey, Lawrie thought, she’d be wearing a _dress_ , a bum-roll, a farthingale, a boned bodice and mob-cap. She’d never played an actual woman before, and she wasn’t at all certain she could. Hansel at day-school in Hampstead, the Shepherd Boy, Jason in the Gondal, (stupid, _putrid_ Ariel), carol-service-and-Eddi, Edward-Oeschli-being-a-monkey, excused _The Sound of Music_ on account of chronic tone-deafness, the no-room-at-the innkeeper in the revived and modernised Christmas Play, a triumphant Peter Quince in the otherwise ramshackle Kingscote attempt at the _Dream_. Apart from audition-pieces (and even there she favoured _travesti_ roles for the obligatory-Shakespeare) she hadn’t moved on stage, or spoken a word, without consciously masculinising her voice and gait. What if that was all she could do, if women were as impossible to her as fairies and sprites? This too, she sensed, was inexplicable, for the same reasons that Viola was inexplicable. Genuine consternation tightened upon her like a corset, quite different from the feigned emotion of a moment ago. She squirmed within it as she had under the torrent of ‘Jabberwocky’, and began, dimly and roughly, to see how it might be done. 

‘Yes, fleshy and _pert_ , like the piglets at home. Revoltingly delicious,’ she murmured. 

‘You what?’ 

‘Have you any money on you, Dunc?’ 

He put his hand in his pocket and jangled desultorily. ‘About three and six. Why?’ 

‘Delicious. You can buy us milkshakes at the tuckshop to celebrate.’ 

‘I—Okay.’ He looked _hopeful_ , which somehow made his acne more livid. 

‘C’mon then.’ She sashayed along the corridor towards the garden door, arms close to her sides, trying out her new piglet-wiggle from shoulder and hip, and whistling, with a self-consciously Shakespearean mental correction to the the ‘i’ and less than an entire overplus of tunefulness, ‘How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria?’

**Author's Note:**

> #3 in a series of fics inspired by lines of poetry obtained using a sort-of _sortes Virgilianae_ method. Antisoppist drew the line 'the stout girl who kept running up and down the one stair at the inn', from Níkos Kavadhías' poem 'The Horse Breeders'.
> 
> Set Since the War, but roughly on the _Cricket Term_ timeline.


End file.
